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NOPD detail system reform to debut 2 years after unveiling

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An NOPD officer works an off-duty paid detail Wednesday night at a Hornets game at the New Orleans Arena. As Mayor Mitch Landrieu begins to implement long-awaited detail reforms, little by little, all off-duty police work will eventually be managed through Landrieu's new Office of Police Secondary Employment.
(Photo by Michael DeMocker, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

Nearly two years after New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas unveiled a sweeping plan to reform the city's controversial paid police-detail system, the city is finally gearing up for launch, with a gradual start aimed at easing the nerves of cops and the local businesses that hire them.

The changes include a new Office of Police Secondary Employment, under the chief administrative office, that will coordinate the off-duty police work -- and charge cops and businesses to keep it afloat. The office is slated to start managing a few details within the next couple of months.

Also, officers who do regular detail work for specific businesses will need to rotate out of those jobs at least once a year -- a change that irks both cops and merchants.

Since Serpas announced a raft of detail reforms in the spring of 2011, the number of off-duty jobs worked by NOPD cops in uniform has fallen by half. City officials blame the decline on the uncertainty surrounding the new system, and perhaps also on poaching by other law enforcement.

That decline, along with a bitter, ongoing court fight with the feds over a consent decree to govern broader NOPD reforms, has the Landrieu administration walking on eggshells as it moves ahead on a new system of oversight. The administration clearly has heard the grumblings of city businesses, as well as the cops themselves, who see such moonlighting as a matter of necessity.

Retired Army Lt. Col. John Salomone was hired last June to implement reforms of paid police details through the mayor's new Office of Police Secondary Employment. NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

"It's important for us to get this right," said retired Army Lt. Col. John Salomone, who was hired by Landrieu last June to run the new office, which the consent decree stipulates must be outside NOPD.

"We can't do things that are going to perhaps exacerbate what some would say is a morale problem in the department," he added.

Plagued by scandal

The changes were initially pushed by Serpas amid scandal in early 2011, when it was revealed that then-8th District commander Edwin Hosli, a close friend of the chief, was allegedly violating departmental rules by running a private company that employed 20 off-duty officers to review traffic-camera violations for the city. Several of Hosli's subordinates were also alleged to be working off-duty traffic details during short breaks while on the NOPD clock.

Still, details have long been a source of controversy within the department, including for Serpas, who rose through the NOPD's ranks with few blemishes on his record. One of the exceptions involved a detail: In 1994, Serpas received a five-day suspension for operating a private security business with another officer without a city occupational license, although the suspension was later overturned.

Since returning to the NOPD in May 2010 as superintendent after stints in other states, Serpas has instituted some reforms of the detail system, such as prohibiting cash payments to officers and requiring cops to call in details to a dispatcher.

Police officers' groups say that was enough.

But Serpas, and the consent decree that U.S. District Court Judge Susie Morgan approved in January, went further. Under the deal, all private details must be run out of the mayor's new office by January.

Among the concerns the broader reforms sought to address: allegations of favoritism on the part of the cops who coordinated details, and a related problem: Some lower-ranking cops were doling out work for their superiors, subverting the NOPD chain of command. Another frequent criticism was that, at times, officers seemed more dedicated to their lucrative off-duty work than their police duties.

Serpas' reforms proposed to set detail pay "uniformly according to rank;" to prohibit splitting police shifts to accommodate detail work; and to require greater accountability for officers who get into trouble during details.

Serpas said the detail system was a key concern when he interviewed with the Landrieu administration three years ago, and he has lauded the federal oversight as a way to ensure the reforms stick.

But at the same time, the Landrieu administration is now arguing in federal court that the police consent decree is no longer necessary.

More practically, Landrieu says the city simply can't risk the $55 million estimated bill over five to seven years for the police agreement if it also must cough up millions of dollars each year for fixes to the city's jail, the subject of a separate consent decree.

The city's fascination with Perricone may simply be a legal gambit that has little to do with the bigger picture. The detail reforms, unlike virtually every other action contemplated in the consent decree, are slated to pay for themselves.

And according to Serpas, the reforms are virtually identical to the ones he proposed in May 2011, more than a year before the city and the feds agreed to the consent decree.

"We knew from the beginning that we had to resolve the question of paid details -- when Mayor Landrieu was the mayor-elect and Ronal Serpas was the police chief of Nashville," Serpas said.

"It was antiquated, antique. It hadn't been changed in 50 years and had to be reordered."

Serpas, however, said he disagrees with the feds' assessment that detail work was hampering police work.

"The nature of details that provide extra security in neighborhood districts does not come at the expense of the regular policing, and sometimes the Department of Justice felt that way, and I just don't think that's true," he said. "I've been a chief a long time and I just disagree with that.

"If people choose to have a police officer standing at their Walgreens or CVS, it does not change the way I deploy resources every day."

City officials say the delay in implementing the reforms owes partly to the consent decree, but also to the need to set up a new apparatus for tracking off-duty policework. Officials had also fretted that the new detail office could violate federal labor law, but those claims appear to have been mooted by a letter from a federal labor lawyer.

Designing a 'superior' system

In a recent interview, Salomone and the city's chief administrative officer, Andy Kopplin, laid out their plan for overseeing the thousands of details that officers work at stores, special events and patrolling certain neighborhoods.

"(Salomone's) instructions are to go forward and continue to do what we agreed to do because we do think that ultimately the system that is being designed is a superior one to the one that we had," Kopplin said.

"That doesn't mean that all the stuff that has been said about the system as it exists today was true. I contend, and I have not seen any evidence to the contrary, that most of our officers and most of our customers do the right thing. Yet there's a potential, it's fair to say, that if it weren't centralized and supporting the chain of command at NOPD that there's the risk that something untoward could occur."

The Landrieu administration will soon propose an ordinance to create an enterprise fund so the city can begin charging businesses an hourly fee for the officers. Businesses now pay officers directly, which allows for "corruptibility," Salomone said.

For now, the mayor is remaining tight-lipped about how much it plans to charge businesses and cops to sustain an office that is expected to cost more than $1 million annually.

The administration denied a request by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune for the city's analysis. It did say that the budget for the coordinating office, with nine or 10 employees, would run $870,000 this year, $1.1 million next year and then $1.7 million a year beyond then.

Salomone and Kopplin claim the detail fee won't be much higher than what officers now charge: $30-$35 per hour. Businesses with significant detail needs often pay now for a coordinating officer; the new office will replace them.

"It's about what the market will bear," Salomone said, noting NOPD officers compete for details with agencies that charge lower rates, such as the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office, Levee District Police and private patrol companies.

"There's a value with NOPD that really no other security provider in the city can offer because you get the full force of the department behind those officers," Salomone said. "Despite the fact that they're off-duty, quote-unquote, they're really on duty and if there's a police emergency that occurs at that place of business, next door, or down the street, that officer responds and has the radio on his shoulder and calls the full force of the department on that emergency."

One of Salomone's four current employees is a marketing director, whose job is essentially to persuade businesses to hire NOPD. He has work to do: The market for NOPD details has shrunken by 50 percent since December 2010, according to data provided by the mayor's office.

Conflicting interests

Salomone said the city was trying to satisfy four stakeholders -- businesses, the police, the public and the feds -- who often have conflicting interests.

So far, the cops aren't satisfied, harboring concerns that the city will be taking their money, said Raymond Burkart III, attorney and spokesman for the local Fraternal Order of Police lodge.

"We can't understand why it's less evil if the city makes the bucks as opposed to the officers," he said. "Reducing costs is trying to make a profit off the officers. It may not be the intent, but it certainly could skew that way."

In transitioning from a system that has remained virtually unchanged since the 1960s, Salomone said, the office plans rely heavily on technology to help five or six coordinators take over the workload of what roughly 150 officers now do.

The city on Jan. 31 released a request for proposals for software that would do the bulk of the coordinating. The software will be chosen shortly, officials said.

Salomone said he plans to use software that would be accessible for officers on mobile apps. Officers will be assigned to details according to their rank, disciplinary record and the number of detail hours they have worked recently.

"There were fairness questions (under the old system), which is, 'I'm not in good with the guy who's in control of that detail so I never get to participate,'" Kopplin said. "So most officers were able to make details. Some officers were able to coordinate some pretty lucrative ones. And the other folks weren't getting what would otherwise be a fair share even though they had a good attitude and wanted to work."

"Our goal is to get every officer who wants a detail and every customer who wants one and make it no more burdensome for either one, and hopefully to make it easier by capitalizing on technology," Salomone said.

Officers who work regular details will be re-assigned at least once per year. The only details that will not be subject to the rotation are banks, hospitals, houses of worship, schools and major special events.

That planned rotation has caused controversy: Salomone said he has received dozens of letters from customers pleading for him to let them keep their officers.

"That's what community policing is about," Salomone said. "When an officer has been working for the same store for eight years, he knows who delivers the vegetables and the trash man, so he can easily sense when something is amiss. That enhances police work. So we don't want to do away with that good thing.

"My whole problem is a baby in bathwater problem. We don't want to throw the baby out -- the good stuff those relationships engender. We do want to formalize these relationships more so as to take away the corruptibility of them. We're not saying that there are corrupt officers or there are corrupt customers or anything, we just want to create a system where everyone can see that's not possible."

When re-assigning officers, the Office of Police Secondary Employment will try to ensure a smooth transition by allowing the next officer to be trained in advance, possibly by the outgoing cop, Salomone said.

Aiming for accountability

Another of Salomone's goals is to ensure officers are held accountable for their detail work. While customers can currently file complaints with the Public Integrity Bureau about officers who arrive late or otherwise neglect their duties, not everyone feels comfortable doing so.

One such customer is Bill Sadin, a homeowner who voted for the Mid-City Security District, which pays off-duty NOPD officers to patrol the neighborhood. On multiple occasions, Sadin has tried to reach the detail officers on their cell phones without success. Recently, he was rebuffed when he asked officers to keep an eye on a property he was renovating that had been targeted by thieves.

"They were pretty dismissive of us, like they had better things to do," Sadin said. "I don't understand why if we need more protection and these guys aren't giving it to us, then why aren't we just going with a private security company where they would be held accountable?"

Sadin said he would be more comfortable filing a complaint with the Office of Secondary Police Employment than with the Public Integrity Bureau because it's run through the mayor's office.

While not conceding the details were as corrupt as the DOJ alleged, police officers' groups argue the new system won't be much of an improvement. "Any system that involves human beings de facto becomes susceptible to human fallibility, whether intentional or not," Burkart said. "What they've created is yet another layer of bureaucracy."

But Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, says he believes taking the coordination and payment responsibilities out of the officers' hands will help restore public confidence in the system.

"This will remove the potential for abuse and wrongdoing," he said. "It's a step in the right direction."